“The Fun Never Ends”: Fox News Statement Taunting Trump Was ‘100 Percent’ Roger Ailes
As the war between Fox News and Donald Trump ratchets up, Roger Ailes is fighting off criticism from his senior executives over his handling of the crisis. According to one highly placed source, last night, Ailes sent out the now-famous statement mocking Trump as being scared to meet with the “Ayatollah” and “Putin” if he became president. “That was Roger 100 percent,” the source explained. “A lot of people on the second floor” — where top Fox executives work — “didn’t think it was a good idea.”
Fox executives are also troubled that Ailes’s principal adviser right now is his longtime personal lawyer and Fox & Friends contributor Peter Johnson Jr. “He wrote the statement with Peter,” the source explained. “Peter is running the war room,” another Ailes friend told me. Fox executives are worried that Ailes is relying on an attorney with scant communications experience as the network is reeling from the biggest PR crisis in recent memory. Historically, during a crisis like this Ailes would have huddled with his veteran communications guru Brian Lewis. But Ailes fired Lewis in 2013 over his concerns that Lewis had been a source for my 2014 Ailes biography. Since Lewis’s ouster, Johnson has taken on the role of media counselor.
Fox spokesperson Irena Briganti did not return a call. When asked about his role advising Ailes, Johnson responded to me with an ad hominem statement. “If you were ever actually fair, any semblance of integrity was swamped by your reaction to the failure of your critically panned hit job on Fox and Ailes,” he said. “Just like your latest tweets and articles, your questions today are based on your own malicious fabrication.”
New signs emerged today at just how frantic Ailes has become to get Trump back to the table. The two men have not spoken since yesterday, sources told me. This morning, Joe Scarborough reported that Ailes called Trump’s daughter Ivanka and wife, Melania, to get through to the GOP front-runner. But Trump is saying he’ll only talk to Rupert Murdoch directly. In a further challenge to Ailes’s power, Bill O’Reilly is scheduled to host Trump. Last night, Ailes directed Sean Hannity to cancel Trump’s interview. O’Reilly’s refusal to abide by a ban adds a new dynamic to the clash of egos. For O’Reilly, this is an opportunity to take back star power from Kelly. Sources say O’Reilly feels he made Kelly’s career by promoting her on his show, and he’s been furious that Kelly surpassed him in the ratings.
Meanwhile, Fox producers are scrambling with the practical matter of how to program the debate without Trump. “Right now, it is about how the moderators handle Trump,” one producer said. “They do not want to be seen either directly criticizing him since he’s not there, and they don’t want to seem like they are drumming up criticism by letting the candidates attack Trump rather than stake out their own positions and debate one another. For all the talk of the optics right now, the bigger issue is how to program a debate without the front-runner. Remember, Fox may be a political machine, but it is still a damn good television programmer.”
For Ailes, the internal dissent over his handling of the crisis would seem to only weaken his grasp on the helm of Fox News. Rupert Murdoch has become more hands-on at Fox since questions about Ailes’s faltering health have been raised. Now Murdoch has to wonder why Ailes, who runs the most valuable asset at parent company 21st Century Fox, is getting PR advice from a lawyer Ailes personally pays.
A spokesperson for Murdoch did not return a call.
By: Gabriel Sherman, Daily Intelligencer, New York Magazine, January 27, 2016
“Critical Role Of Diplomacy”: The GOP Presidential Candidates Really Embarrassed Themselves During The Iran Navy Incident
It was a foreign policy crisis: After an equipment failure rendered their vehicle inoperative, a group of American military personnel had fallen into the hands of an adversarial state far away. How would the president get them back? A daring rescue mission? Threats of military action? Diplomacy? Outright groveling? In the end, he felt he had no choice but to submit to the hostage-takers’ demands, and the government wrote a letter filled with apologetic language (“We are very sorry” for the incident, and “We appreciate” our adversary’s “efforts to see to the well-being of our crew” they held prisoner for 10 days).
You would think that Republicans, who are so committed to the singular importance of “strength” in foreign affairs, would have been outraged and appalled at the weakness shown by the president in this incident. But they weren’t. That’s because the president was George W. Bush, and this was April 2001, when an American spy plane had to make an emergency landing on a Chinese island after a mid-air collision with a Chinese fighter jet. Here’s the letter of apology.
It was hard not to be reminded of that incident 15 years ago when this week two small American naval boats apparently drifted into Iranian territorial waters in the Persian Gulf after engines failed, and the Iranian navy detained them. As soon as the capture of the vessels was reported, Republican politicians stiffened their spines, flexed their pecs, and condemned the wimpy and feckless Obama administration that was obviously going to grovel before the ayatollah, leaving our brave sailors at the mercy of the Iranians for who knows how many days, weeks, or months. “The fact that [the capture] happened is a direct consequence of the weakness of the Obama-Clinton foreign policy,” said Ted Cruz, no doubt thinking wistfully about how if he were in charge, once the boats came up on radar the Iranians would have said, “Let them go where they want — we don’t want to anger President Cruz, who is so strong and resolute.” Joe Scarborough, perhaps caught in the middle of a Charles Atlas workout, tweeted, “Hey Iran, you have exactly 300 days left to push a U.S. president around. Enjoy it while you can. After that, there will be hell to pay.” Jeb Bush, testosterone practically dripping off his iPhone, tweeted, “If our sailors aren’t coming home yet, they need to now. No more bargaining. Obama’s humiliatingly weak Iran policy is exposed again.”
But then something strange happened. Wednesday morning, after only 16 hours, Iran released the sailors back to the United States, along with their boats. And we didn’t even have to bomb anybody.
A few conservatives are currently expressing faux-outrage over photos taken by the Iranians showing the sailors with their hands on their heads during the capture, as though that were some epic humiliation. But what’s important is that the whole matter was settled through a series of phone calls between American and Iranian officials, in which they apparently agreed that nobody was trying to be provocative and it would be best not to blow this out of proportion. Secretary of State John Kerry explicitly made the case that the administration was able to resolve this incident the way it did because of the diplomatic contacts that had been built up during negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program. “We can all imagine how a similar situation might have played out three or four years ago,” he said. “Today, this kind of issue was able to be peacefully resolved and efficiently resolved, and that is a testament to the critical role that diplomacy plays in keeping our country safe, secure and strong.”
So what do we learn from this? First, diplomacy does work. It’s possible that even if we hadn’t spent a couple of years negotiating with Iran, we would have arrived at the same outcome, but it probably didn’t hurt that our officials and their officials have a better relationship today. And it’s hard to imagine that even the most bellicose of Republican candidates wouldn’t have done the same thing the Obama administration did.
Maybe we’re supposed to believe that if someone like Ted Cruz was president and a couple of small boats got captured, when his secretary of state said, “Mr. President, I’ll call their foreign minister and see if we can’t get this taken care of,” he’ll say, “No, Bob — I’m going to go on TV and tell those jerks that if they don’t release our sailors in 10 minutes, we’re letting the bombs fall!” But I doubt it. In the real world, Republicans do diplomacy when the situation demands it too, and I have trouble believing that any politician would be so reckless as to cause a confrontation when it would have been so unnecessary.
Second, it’s a reminder that reducing every foreign policy question to “strength” is idiotic. There are times when strength matters a lot, and times when you have to be smart and restrained. Complaining about the “weakness” of the Obama administration may play well during primary season, but in real foreign policy a nation doesn’t demonstrate strength by going around provoking everything it sees.
That’s how you act when you’re gripped by insecurity and you need to overcompensate. Candidates can live in their fantasy world, where they’re constantly causing dramatic showdowns they always win because of their steely glare. But fortunately for us (and for those 10 sailors), none of them had the chance to test their theory. At least not this time.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; Contributor, The Week, January 14, 2016
“Will Jeb Hold His Fire On Rubio?”: It May Simply Be Too Late For Team Bush To Do Anything At All
When the Bush family is your friend:
On the night of the 2010 midterm elections, a portly, silver-haired Jeb Bush stood on a stage in the courtyard of Miami’s luxe Biltmore Hotel, appearing to choke back tears. The beloved former governor of Florida was there to introduce the young conservative insurgent who had just pulled off a remarkable underdog victory in the U.S. Senate race.
“Bushes get emotional, so I’m gonna try my hardest,” Jeb told the ecstatic crowd of Republicans. “My wife told me, ‘Don’t cry, don’t cry.’ But Marco Rubio makes me cry for joy!”
At the time, it looked like the culmination of a sturdy alliance and deep friendship — the proud mentor presenting his protege.
When the Bush family is not your friend:
Meanwhile, in a series of off-the-record conversations, Jeb’s messengers tried to convince a number of influential figures in political media that they had the goods on Rubio. Among these was MSNBC host Joe Scarborough. A former Republican congressman from Florida who remained tapped into the state’s politics, Scarborough was skeptical whenever somebody tried to convince him that Rubio had an explosive career-ending secret lurking in his past.
“Everybody who runs against him says he has girlfriends, or financial problems. They throw a lot of shit at the wall,” Scarborough told me. “It’s the same thing from the Jeb Bush camp. They keep telling me, ‘Oh, we’ve got the thing that’s going to take him down.’ But nobody’s ever produced anything that we all haven’t read in the Tallahassee Democrat.”
Back in October 2004, Richard Gooding did a deep-dive for Vanity Fair on how the Bush machine had trashed John McCain during the 2000 South Carolina primary. It’s the kind of piece that merits an occasional re-reading, especially whenever there’s a Bush running for president, which seems to be most of the time.
There appears to be no doubt that Team Jeb is prepared for a repeat performance and that Marco Rubio is their target. Round One was during the early fundraising/endorsement phase of the campaign. Round Two is coming up shortly.
Yet, it may be too little, too late. Politico reports that Republican senators are so concerned about Ted Cruz that they’re beginning to coalesce behind Rubio. This is basically an acknowledgment that Jeb simply has no juice and is never going to rise out of his doldrums. In fact, Jeb may find that there’s no appetite for the Phase Two attack on Rubio from the Republican Establishment because they now see Rubio as their last opportunity to avoid a catastrophic situation where their nominee comes from the Trump/Carson/Cruz camp.
Trump and Carson are seen as unfit for the office of the presidency, and Cruz is simply loathed. All three of them are considered poor general election candidates who have the potential to put the GOP’s congressional majorities (especially the Senate) at risk.
If Jeb’s minions go out there floating rumors that Marco Rubio has a secret family and a bushel of mistresses, that’s not going to fly. It would be one thing if this were going to work for Bush, but the latest Quinnipiac poll out of Iowa has him at four percent. I mean, even the moribund Rand Paul campaign is at five percent.
If the Bushes tear down Rubio without rising themselves, there’s no one left to stop the barbarians at the gates of the Republican National Convention.
It may simply be too late for Team Bush to do anything at all about their situation. Assuming, that is, that they want to retain any good will with the Republican Establishment at all.
By: Martin Longman, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, November 30, 2015
“Bald-Faced And Blatant Lies”: Debate Fallout; Even Conservatives Are Appalled By Republican Mendacity
For people who so often accuse Hillary Clinton of lying, the Republican presidential candidates seem to feel perfectly free to bend, twist, and shred the truth at will. Unsurprisingly, that is just what several of them were caught doing in their free-for-all CNBC debate. They prevaricated about themselves, their policies, and their opponents, without blinking an eye – and for the most part, they got away with it.
Do nice people tell self-serving lies? Perhaps they do, because it was terribly nice Ben Carson who uttered one of the most blatant whoppers of the evening.
To loud booing from the partisan audience, moderator Carl Quintanilla asked the soft-spoken neurosurgeon about his long and lucrative involvement with Mannatech, a nutritional supplement manufacturer that has been cited for false health claims for its “glyconutrients.” (How bad was Mannatech? Bad enough to provoke a fraud action brought by Greg Abbott, the former Texas attorney general who is now that state’s very conservative governor.)
“I didn’t have an involvement with [Mannatech],” retorted Carson. “That is total propaganda, and this is what happens in our society. Total propaganda.”
What Carson’s noisy fans probably didn’t know is that this was no “liberal media” setup. The doctor’s decade-long relationship with Mannatech – which turns out to have included a written contract, paid speeches, and a video endorsement on the company’s website – was exposed last year by Jim Geraghty of National Review, the flagship publication of American conservatism. Following the debate, Geraghty slammed Carson for “bald-faced lies” and “blatantly lying” about his relationship with the supplement firm.
Equally mendacious about his own personal history was Marco Rubio, who “won” the debate according to many observers. When Becky Quick of CNBC asked a predictable question about his checked financial affairs, which have included foreclosures, liquidations, phony expense accounts, and other embarrassments, the senator from Florida shot back: “You just listed a litany of discredited attacks from Democrats and my political opponents, and I’m not gonna waste 60 seconds detailing them all.”
Discredited attacks? Actually, Quick’s question was premised on facts that are not in dispute – as even Rubio himself acknowledged in his own campaign book. So frontally deceptive was his response that an outraged Joe Scarborough, his fellow Florida Republican, called him out on MSNBC’s Morning Joe the next day.
“Marco just flat-out lied to the American people there,” Scarborough complained. “And I was stunned that the moderators didn’t stop there and go, ‘Wait a second, these are court records. What are you talking about?…Becky was telling the truth, Marco was lying. And yet everybody’s going, ‘Oh, Marco was great.’ No, Marco lied about his financials.” Not incidentally, Rubio also lied about the effects of his tax plan, claiming his tax cuts would mostly benefit lower-income families when in fact its biggest benefits would accrue to the top one percent, as Republican tax schemes almost always do.
Another brand of lie was pronounced by Carly Fiorina, who drew attention at the last GOP by insisting she had watched a grisly Planned Parenthood video that doesn’t exist. This time, she reached back to the 2012 Republican campaign to invent a factoid about women’s employment.
Fiorina tries to sell herself as the candidate tough enough to take down Clinton, and tries to prove it by making stuff up. At this debate, she huffed:
It is the height of hypocrisy for Mrs. Clinton to talk about being the first woman president, when every single policy she espouses and every single policy of President Obama has been demonstratively bad for women. Ninety-two percent of the jobs lost during Barack Obama’s first term belonged to women.
But as PolitiFact quickly established, that statement was false in every particular. Not only did women not lose “92 percent” of the jobs in Obama’s first term, the number of women employed during the period from January 2009 to January 2013 grew by 416,000. Naturally, as she did with Planned Parenthood, Fiorina angrily repeated the lie when challenged.
Fiorina isn’t the only Republican who doesn’t like being exposed. Rubio ridiculously claimed that the “mainstream media” is really a Democratic SuperPAC. And now RNC chair Reince Priebus has reneged on the party’s debate agreement with NBC News. He and his candidates just couldn’t handle two hours of sharp but thoroughly polite questioning.
They constantly insult Clinton, but how would any of these slippery blowhards survive something like the 11-hour Benghazi grilling she breezed through on Capitol Hill? If you want to understand who they are, just listen to them whine.
By: Joe Conason, Editor in Chief, Editor’s Blog, Featured Post, The National Memo, October 30, 2015
“False And Foolish Prophets”: Iran Deal; Why Would We Heed The Same Voices That Are Always Wrong?
Nobody was surprised by Benjamin Netanyahu’s immediate denunciation of the Iran nuclear agreement as “a historic mistake for the world.” Echoing the Israeli prime minister’s reaction were all the usual suspects in this country — a panoply of pundits and politicians from Weekly Standard editor William Kristol and Fox News Channel analyst Charles Krauthammer to MNSBC host Joe Scarborough.
Focusing on the alleged pitfalls of the deal between Iran and the world powers, these critics elide provisions that would allow economic sanctions to “snap back” quickly if Iran violates its promises, and greatly increase the Islamic Republic’s difficulty in building an undetected bomb. They don’t explain that if the United States had walked away, the result would have been disintegration of international sanctions, a rapid buildup of Iran’s nuclear capability, and the likelihood of war – not just bombs, but “boots on the ground.”
What everyone should remember about the agreement’s prominent foes is something they will never mention: their own shameful record in promoting our very worst foreign policy mistake since Vietnam.
Like his admirers here, Netanyahu was a fervent proselytizer for war against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. He appeared before the United States Congress in 2002 to frighten Americans and whip up belligerence. “There is no question whatsoever” – mark those words – “that Saddam is seeking, is working, is advancing toward the development of nuclear weapons,” he intoned, restating the “mushroom cloud” rhetoric of national security advisor Condoleezza Rice and vice president Dick Cheney, among others.
Around the same time, Krauthammer declared: “Time is running short. Saddam has weapons of mass destruction. He is working on nuclear weapons. And he has every incentive to pass them on to terrorists who will use them against us.” As the vote on Bush’s war resolution approached that fall, he warned that “we must remove from power an irrational dictator who…is developing weapons of mass destruction that could kill millions of Americans in a day.”
And we heard the same endless, hysterical exhortations from Kristol, Scarborough, and the entire cohort that had been pushing for war in Iraq ever since 9/11. No doubt they wish we would forget they ever uttered such nonsense. But at the time they argued that not only would Saddam’s overthrow mean “the end of his weapons of mass destruction,” as Scarborough once gloated, but the democratic ouster of all our enemies in the Mideast.
On that claim, Netanyahu was unwavering and absolute. “If you take out Saddam, Saddam’s regime,” he told Congress, “I guarantee you that it will have enormous positive reverberations on the region. And I think that people sitting right next door in Iran, young people, and many others, will say the time of such regimes, of such despots is gone.”
Of course, Bibi’s “guarantee” was worth less than the pitch of any used-car salesmen. So was Kristol’s blithering reassurance that Iraq’s Shi’a and the Sunni communities felt no enmity that would disrupt the bright future post-Saddam.
As Netanyahu noted not long ago – while arguing, ironically, against negotiations with Iran – the mullahs in Tehran now have far greater influence than we do over the Iraqi government in Baghdad, because both are dominated by Shi’a parties. (He failed to recall his own wrong predictions.) So we wasted blood and treasure to throw out Saddam and empower the Iranian mullahs in his place. And now the same figures responsible for that policy disaster demand that the United States turn away from the prospect of a peaceful resolution with Iran, and toward still another armed conflict.
The fundamental truth, recognized by Republican idol Ronald Reagan, is that negotiations are always preferable to war. Yet many on the American right have often preferred war, including the utterly insane risk of nuclear war, to dealing with our enemies. Earlier this year, Scarborough suggested that even if the Iran deal looked better than expected, he disdains peace talks on principle – as do the neoconservatives, who rose to prominence lobbying against strategic arms negotiations with the Soviet Union.
“I never trusted the Soviets,” said Scarborough. “I never wanted Reagan to make deals with the Soviets in the late ‘80s. It turned out well, but I was always against détente and against dealing with communists. And right now, I’m against dealing with a country whose Supreme Leader calls us the devil, who says death to America at the same time he’s negotiating this deal.”
“It turned out well” is to put it very mildly. Not only was President Reagan’s reputation enhanced, but owing to decades of negotiation, we avoided a nuclear conflict that would have ended life on this planet. Yet Scarborough and his ilk reject the idea of talking with our enemies – although any negotiation over matters of war and peace will always require that distasteful necessity.
Twelve years ago, we made the historic mistake of listening to all these false and foolish prophets. There is no excuse to repeat that tragic error.
By: Joe Conason, Editor in Chief, Editors Blog, The National Memo, July 14, 2015
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